Birds Before The Storm

I know, I know, not the most promising title to a blogpost, but man, this is funny. It’s 7 minutes of a cop trying to pass a truck. The truck driver cuts him off, every time. When I watched it, I accidentally put on Loreena McKennit at the same time, for a particularly hyponotizing experience. Definitely worth it. And no, nothing really changes during the video, it’s safe to only watch half of. But it really is funny.

About a month ago, we learned that reality TV had hit bottom, with the announcement of Smile, You’re Under Arrest, a reality show from Fox (of course) in which people with warrants are tricked into believing it will be the best day of their lives, only to discover it is actually the worst, as they are being arrested. The man responsible, Mike Darnell, talks about how the show will only have non-violent criminals. Oh, and it’s all okay, because (from Darnell): “If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law.”

So anyway, I was full up with hate for a good minute over that. But today, the internets provides good news, perhaps even an answer. Kopbusters (website currently down, most likely flooded with traffic). This show, created by Barry Cooper, is essentially a setup to catch the police breaking the law in a drug raid. They rented a house and outfit it with surveillance, then set up grow lights and two small potted plants that looked like weed, but weren’t. Eventually, the police raided the house, even though they had no legal method of “knowing” that there could be drugs inside. Here’s some of the raw footage.

Cooper is an ex-narcotics cop who now apparently makes his living selling videos about how to avoid getting busted for drugs. He also campaigns against the drug war.

I’m looking forward to seeing the show, and I hope it runs for a long, long time. (Or that we abolish the specialization of enforcement and remove the police as an institution. That would make me happy as well.)

This guy is really strange. And funny. And talks about seniors in the post-apoc stabbing one another.

Oh dear. I thought I wouldn’t make any more election-related posts between now and election day. But, well, a group called The Masked Avengers, from Canada, prank called Sarah Palin, pretending to be the president of France. She bought it, and of course, made an ass of herself, and of course, it’s really, really funny. There’s a transcript available as well, which includes translations of some of the bits they say in French. And there’s the usual fun back and forth in the comments over at boing boing.

So there’s this group that you’ve probably already heard of, the Westboro Baptist Church, who run godhatesfags.com (ooh, and even more interesting, godhatestheworld.com, an interactive map that lets you find out why god hates everywhere). Basically, these people go around and picket other folk’s funerals for being gay, or even more bizarre, the funerals of dead soldiers, since the soldiers were “defending” a country that “harbors” homosexuals. Anyhow, they’re a bunch of bastards, really summing up the whole “close-minded religious lunatic” thing pretty effectively. So anyhow, a few people have shown up at their protests and made pretty clever protest signs:
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A few weeks back I posted the video of the mortifying Big Dog, a scary bipedial robot that is destined to destroy the human race. Today, however, thanks to Jake, I’ve run across Big Dog, beta. It’s embedded above, but if you go that page you’ll find out more about it.

It’s like a car wreck: anarchist or no, you can’t help but pay attention to some degree to the upcoming election. But what I like to hear is anarchist strategy in regards to the election, and the good old Center For Strategic Anarchy has offered up an analysis of the election from an anarchist point of view.

we are far better equipped to take advantage of liberal disillusionment than liberal outrage. The last four years have been a testament to this, with the clearest beneficiaries of outrage being the Democratic party and the authoritarian Left (see: the anti-war movement.) Liberal disillusionment has been far kinder to anarchists. The C.S.A. is of the opinion that it is no accident that the surge of anarchist activity in the late ’90s overlapped with a Democratic administration in the process of moving to the right.

Four years ago, I put it to my uncle, a concerned and politically aware liberal. I asked him how he would convince me, an anarchist, to vote for president. And his primary response was that while yes, the president has little power to change things for the better, the tone they set “trickles down” (yes, my uncle intended that irony) to all levels of the system.

I’m certainly not of the opinion that anarchists need to rush off and go vote (except for in local elections… Oregon has got some seriously racist and classist initiatives that need shooting down), but there’s no denying that what happens in a couple weeks is going to affect everyone, probably everyone in the world.

What anarchists actually want, and our problems with the “democratic” system as stands, are pretty well summed up in this new zine by crimethInc: The Party Is Over.

And, of course, Bill Hick’s little speech still rings true:

Desolation
He loses the fingers, sudden as
arms
Sarah Gridley

That poem is on page 3076 of Issue 1, a wonderful jab at culture by forgodot.com (and possibly Steve McLaughlin), an experimental poetry group.

Why is it interesting? Because Sarah Gridley, whoever she is, didn’t write that poem. In fact, none of the 3,000+ authors listed wrote the pieces that are attributed to them. It’s a 3785 page PDF file poetry anthology of beautiful lies and blasphemy!

One of the most fun parts is reading all of the writers respond in the comments. Tons of them are hopping mad. Others get it.

Silliman (whoever that is), is worried about his good name and makes vague threats about suing the editors. He also calls it “anarcho-flarf vandalism”. And all I gotta say is, go anarcho-flarf vandalism! I wonder what the anarcho-flarf flag would be. Maybe black and newspaper print? I could get down with that.

Honestly, I haven’t been excited about poetry in years. Or art, really, though I have to pretend like I am. Dada and surrealism got sucked into mainstream art, what’s left? Well, for starters, 3,000 poem anthologies of god-knows-what.

One poet that took it well and spoke reasonably on the subject is Sharanya Manivannan, who explains a bit more about the nature of the project and also the root of the word “anarcho-flarf”.

This video is funny. It’s not actually informative.